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Informit attends the 39th UKSG Conference

The 39th annual UKSG conference was recently held in Bournemouth, United Kingdom and was attended by approximately 850 delegates from 150 academic institutions.

This major event in the scholarly communications calendar attracts delegates from around the world, including librarians, publishers and content providers.

Informit was represented by UK agent, Thompson Henry’s Peter Dodd, who met with existing customers such as Netherlands’ Leiden University, King’s College London, Oxford University and the British Library.

Mr Dodd attended several information sessions which he described as excellent, including ‘Collection development in a world without subject librarians’, presented by senior staff from Manchester, Northumbria and Edinburgh Universities.

They addressed the challenges and opportunities faced by libraries that are transitioning from traditional subject librarian roles.

“With reductions in library staff it is now extremely difficult for many librarians to have the required depth of knowledge for all the areas they have to cover,” Mr Dodd said.

“Print resources are limited by cost and physical space, and libraries are looking for best value when they review resources, which should be accessible and cost effective.”

These changes are being driven by new approaches to organisational design, relationship management and data insight in universities, as well as technological developments in scholarly publishing.

“Universities now look to digital first for everything – from data to content management. Both are seen as key factors in making library structures work.”

Their objective was to explore how users, from first-year undergraduates to seasoned researchers, search and discover information and to identify users’ patterns and behaviours. This resulted in recommendations to ensure library search interfaces are simple, functional and visually appealing to aid discoverability.

UKSG’s mission is to connect the knowledge community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication. Read more about the conference sessions here.

Informit is a leading provider of information management services to the education, government and corporate sectors.

From its head office in Melbourne, Australia, Informit works with library consortia, associations and agents to help users advance their research through access to peer reviewed and specialist journals, monographs, reports, conference papers and bibliographic indexes, collated with a focus on regional perspectives and otherwise hard-to-find research.